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Around the ‘Verse for this week has arrived. Check out the transcript of the show! Transcript by CanadianSyrup, Shiver Bathory, Sunjammer, NYXT, Nehkara TLDR(Too Long;Didn’t Read) Intro 2.4 has some network bugs preventing a release...

Around the ‘Verse for this week has arrived. Check out the transcript of the show!

Transcript by CanadianSyrup, Shiver Bathory, Sunjammer, NYXT, Nehkara

TLDR(Too Long;Didn’t Read)

Intro

2.4 has some network bugs preventing a release at the moment.

Question 3 from the Drake market survey is out and Buccaneer owners who participate will receive a Voyager Direct package based off of the popular vote which will be announced after the survey ends.

Monthly Report goes live tomorrow.

News From Around The Verse

Los Angeles

Elwin’s team has been putting the finishing touches to the Cat’s Cargo Module

He has also started work on the Command Module for it in addition to other sections like ship corridors

Paul Reindell leading the work on Item System 2.0 as well as doing work on 2.4

John Sherman taken position of Character Art Director in L.A.

Working on hair, next round of clothes purchasable in game

Two Gauge doing additional work for clothes and shopping

Austin

Persistence related crashes being heavily worked on

The Senior Ship Animator Jay Brushwood is in London working on ship enter and exit animations at the mocap studio

Herald whitebox review scheduled this week

Foundry 42 Frankfurt

Brian is joined by Hannes this week

Hannes is Cinematics Director and is back briefly from London

He talks about the process of mocap and how the process went a lot smoother this time

Scheduling can be hard as they have to plan around when certain actors can and can’t have beards

ATV Interview: Josh Herman

Jared is interviewing Josh Herman, the new Character Art Director.

Character Art Director overviews the character teams in LA and the UK.

This includes all PU, SQ42, Cinematics and Marketing that involves characters.

It’s easier than having two separate Art Directors for SQ42 and the PU.

Josh thinks the cast is incredible.

Jared let slip there are new cast members. Josh Huston is one of them.

Josh previously worked at Marvel on the Avengers and related movies in the Visual Development group.

He did some Iron Man suits (Mk7 at end of original Avengers, for example).

Before that he worked at Naughty Dog.

He worked on the custom character creator system for Uncharted 3’s multiplayer component.

He moved to CIG for more of a challenge, it’s a very ambitious title.

Working on character hair. It’s coming – they now have a pipeline in place but they are currently working on hair for Squadron 42 hero characters first.

Female avatar is coming, but unknown ETA. Some revisions made recently.

2.4 is a test for the systems involved in customization and shopping – they will be looking to add more clothing/customization options with each patch going forward.

Currently hiring new artists at every studio.

Josh found out about the game from Gurmukh, one of the concept artists.

They both taught at the same school where they got talking.

He bought a game package, flew around and figured out what the game is – ended up getting more and more into it as he followed the game and watched all the shows.

Josh is heading off to the UK in a few weeks to help improve the processes there.

Alpha 2.4: The QA Experience

Justin Binford is the QA Director and manages the QA department in the four main studios

QA has teams in each studio and employs a “follow the sun” approach to provide almost 24 hour coverage

Persistence was the most challenging aspects of testing 2.4 it touches every other feature

QA also had to contend with the new control schemes, Shopping, Port Modification, Repair and Refuel

The large scale PTU sessions are helpful for maxing out the servers but there was a need for a middle ground to look at specific bugs in a more orderly way

PTU Testers have been collaborating on Discord, getting in groups, testing everything and verifying each other’s reports

the Evocati group has been incredibly valuable in testing 2.4 and the new features

Soldier 1: There’s a guy to the guy, guy to the right. Two guys to the right.

BND: Two guys to the right, ****, yeah I see them.

Sandi Gardiner (SG): That’s really cool to see people getting together and organising these types of events.

Ben Lesnick (BL): And it’s cool to see the FPS in action. We went ahead with getting everything into the Persistent Universe all at once and they kind of see how it works. People are boarding ships and fighting and having battles, it’s really need.

SG: It is, it’s very cool. Welcome to this week’s episode of Around the ‘Verse, a weekly look at Star Citizen’s development, I’m Sandi Gardiner.

BL: I’m Ben Lesnick, and we’re all home finally!

SG: We are! We’re all finally home after a long couple of weeks.

BL: Yes it’s not the same when we’re not working closely together.

SG: I know it feels like it’s been forever.

BL: Yeah because I was out for awhile and you were in Europe working on the squadron stuff. How did it go by the way?

SG: It went really well. It was nice to see all the UK folks who are now split on three floors.

BL: Oh wow.

SG: So that was good exercise for me and it was cold anyway, so it was fun to run up and down the stairs.

BL: Sounds like a great summer vacation.

SG: I know, it was not summer in Manchester, put it that way.

BL: Well the big question on everybody’s mind is “Where is Alpha 2.4?”

SG: Where is Alpha 2.4? We are still having a few network issue so Alpha 2.4 is not quite here yet, but we will be keeping you updated with every update that we get.

BL: And it’s still in active development on the PTU so there should be plenty of information out there from backers already who have experienced the current version, but you probably heard that this is the big patch that introduces persistence to Star Citizen. It’s going to be a major, major milestone when we get that up and running. It also adds in game shopping using Alpha UEC that you earn instead of buy through the website. It adds the flyable Starfarer, the largest ship we’ve done yet. It’s going to be a big deal, we’ll just get it out as soon as we can.

SG: Have you tried it out yet?

BL: I have, it’s a lot of fun when we’re not having some network issues.

SG: That is true. I actually had a pretty decent run at it. It took me a long time to find my clothes for starters and then I went running around and I went into the Casaba store getting some shirts and pants and shoes and stuff, all the same style shoe, but different colours. Then what did I do? I went to the weapon area and all the guns, you can try out all the guns.

BL: You’re saying you have a concern about Star Citizen shoe styles?

SG: It was kind of interesting, but I’m still waiting for my female character devs out there who are watching this. It was a lot of fun, hopefully we will get it out there to you guys soon.

BL: We should send you to Austin to show them what they should be making for shoes.

SG: Oh yeah, exactly. You hearing that Tony?

In other news, the Buccaneer is available now through Monday, you can pick yourself up a Buccaneer fighter and there’s also a little questioneer, questioneer?

BL: Questioneer!

SG: Yeah! There’s also a little..

BL: Questioneer for the Buccaneer!

SG: Exactly! Do you want to tell us about that then>?

BL: When we do a concept sale, the folks at Turbulent like to put together a fun little add on. Sometimes it’s a mini game or a clicker thing, whatever they think will be interesting. This time around we did a Drake customer information form as though Drake Interplanetary asking the customers about their lives. We’ve been doing a question every two days, there will be five total. Some of the answer tend towards, “I’m a law abiding person who works in groups for the betterment of mankind and some of them tend towards, “I’m a lone wolf works outside the law type of person”.

Once every question has been asked and answered by the community, we will reward a particular prize package depending on the overall response. So there’s one type of Voyager direct package that is for law and order folks and one for lone wolf folks and we will announce which one won and award it to everyone who has a Buccaneer at the end of every sale.

SG: There you go! We’re gonna ask Ben to say that one more time. No I also want to thank Jim Martin, just to talk about myself for a few moments because he made me look really really good in that art that he did, so thank you very much.

BL: You don’t need Jim Martin for that.

SG: Very nice dress.

BL: Jim Martin is the designer of the Buccaneer. If you tuned into Around the ‘Verse last week you saw him sitting down with me to talk about the ship and we’re going to have another segment in the next couple episodes where we’ll talk about his career and some the other work he’s done.

SG: Next, our Monthly Report goes live this Friday with updates from all our development studios.

BL: So if you want to know what exactly what Turbulent was doing in May or what the folks in Germany have been up to, you’ll find out.

SG: With that let’s check in with our studios from around the world and see what’s happening in News From Around The Verse.

News From Around The Verse

Los Angeles

EKD: And we have a bunch of great updates for you from the Los Angeles studio i’m going to let Elwin kick it off on what his team’s been working on

EB: So we have been working really hard on finishing up the Caterpillar. Specifically the team has been putting the final touches on the Cargo Module. Which is, as you guys probably already know 50% the length of that ship. So it’s quite a bit. And i’m starting off on the Command Module, which is also very complicated part of the ship. In addition to starting to move into other sections of the ship’s, hallways and things like that. But it’s looking very good

EKD: It’s cool it’s coming together really well. I think some of our internal folks as we see more art on it we are getting pretty excited to fly that thing around and fill it full of cargo!

EB: And maybe other things..

EKD: And maybe other things, but mostly cargo. Yeah mostly cargo. Well that’s the ships. Obviously ships are a big part of the L.A. studio so that’s what Elwin’s team working on. We also, on the other side of the house on the Engineering side, we have Item System 2.0. We have been talking about this a lot because it is a massive feature, and it’s a massive update to just how you interact with our game, so we’re really really excited about it. Paul Reindell has been leading the charge, not only for 2.4. 2.4 has been a lot of works for us with persistence, so there’s a lot of bugs we’re ironing out.

While his whole team is working on different portions of the item system. The new system, an interactive system and all that kind of stuff, it’s going to be really cool when we get this thing to play. It’s going to be a big part of Squadron as well as the overall game, it’s going to be a cool feature. Outside of that characters, we got a pretty good size Character Team since John Sherman joined us here, the Character Art Director. So we’re working on hair, we’re working on the next round of shopping clothes. Some more clothes we’re working on, some stuff like that. On the other side Two Gauge has also been still working on shopping and clothes, and shopping and clothes and that’s been a big one for the L.A. studio. So those are some updates outside of that we got a bunch of other stuff we’re working on but those are the highlights for the week

EB: Some of them are obviously kind of exciting parts.

EKD: Anything else, any other updates for your, for you or for the ships or for L.A. before we sign off and say goodbye?

EB: No, I think that’s about it yeah

EKD: We said, there’s nothing more to be said

EB: No there’s quite a bit I just can’t say it!

EKD: And that’s all we can say! All that we can say has been said. Alright I think that’s it. Thanks guys for stopping by L.A. I’m Eric

EB: And I’m Elwin.

Austin

Jake Ross: Hey guys Jake Ross here Producer of the Austin studio and i’m here with you this week to talk about what’s going on here in Austin and a little bit of what’s going on elsewhere. So the first thing i’ll talk about is performance and stability. We have 2.4.0 it’s been on PTU for a while and we got the features kind of where we want them and we got them to the point where you guys are liking them. Now it’s just a matter of getting it stable enough to put it out there on live. So we got Jason Eli and Tom Sawyer here working through the persistence crashes. It’s pretty heavy monstrous thing: persistence.

So it’s got a lot of crashes. Even though those guys did a really good job there’s always a lot of things that we cannot foresee that goes wrong and a lot of it’s on the gameplay side. So we got Paul Reindell huffing on them over in L.A. helping to knock out some of the persistence bugs on the gameplay side so he and Jason Eli and Tom Sawyer are tag teaming to knock those persistence bugs out. We’ve also got network client performance issues, crashes that are being worked on throughout the company. So performance and stability are something we’re constantly monitoring. Ahmed and Jeffrey Piece here in Austin are monitoring that, providing as many updates as they can to help educate where the biggest pitfalls are.

So in the works we’re trying to get it as smooth and stable as possible so we can get it out in you guys hands. Speaking of earlier when I talked about what was going on elsewhere. We got Jay Brushwood our Senior Ship Animator here in Austin over in London. He was in London last week, participating in the mo-cap shoot they got going over there. We’re capturing new ship enter and exit animations. They’re on the mo-cap set. So he and Steve Bender are teaming up and capturing those animations so we can give you guys some specific options for getting in and out of the ships faster, which I know everybody’s excited about. So that’s in the works this week as well.

We’ve also got a whitebox review of the Herald scheduled for this week. So we’re at a point we can say “Ok we got the Herald where we want it in the whitebox phase”. Certain phases like art is moved into greybox a little bit, but we can now review as a whole the design, and animation, and art can all get together and review this ship in its current state so we can move that ship further along in the pipeline. So that’s where we’re at with the Herald and that being again, the art is being headed up here in Austin by Josh Coons so that’s pretty exciting. Yeah that’s all I got for you this week guys. Thanks see you around.

Foundry 42 Frankfurt

Brian Chambers: Hey everyone Brian from Frankfurt. This week team’s busy not going to run down what everybody’s doing. Hannes you know him. Our Cinematics Director. He’s got back from the shoot, you were out there how long?

Hannes Appell: Two weeks

BC: Two weeks. So he’s got back from another pcap shoot so I thought i’d bring him. He can chat about what they did and tell us as much as you can!

HA: Basically I think last year we shot I would say 75% of all the story material but there were two chapters that were kind of loose and not written yet fully and so backed off and didn’t shoot them back them. And we also developed more secondary material now for certain bits that we found like it could be a little bit more explained or something.

BC: Could be expanded a little bit more

HA: Yeah. We had more introductory chapters for basically newcomers. We shot this current material this time it was two weeks and was pretty much a well oiled machine from day two. Day one was a bit clunky getting the team back in business. We had live pcap working pretty well again and our levels. We even had certain scenes where we

BC: Can I real quick. So the livecap is kind of the live previews. So you know everybody’s in the funky suits with the dots and around the cameras but with the live mocap we actually have the environment in there or the ship or whatever it is, and it’s mapped to the characters in real time and we’re seeing them actually interacting with the environment and it gives you and Chris and others more of a true sense of how things are going to play out then right?

HA: Yes. I think it’s a perfect blueprint for any matters but also level designers they see already how it is working and looking in the level at the right spot and they don’t need to have something in their mind because we basically had the blueprint right there on set and they just need to polish what’s there

BC: So that live previs can then be recorded saved out as videos. That’s no the data the animators or anybody’s working with, but they’ll use that as reference points.

HA: There’s no doubt anymore where each scene takes place because we already had it right at the spot where it takes place. And this time we actually had some of our scanned heads already in. Because last time we basically scanned the actors while they were shooting so we basically just had clones. But this time we actually had the actual heads on certain actors already in the scenes and they were quite happy seeing themselves. So that was pretty funny. I think the best thing we did, we shot some things, like it’s a Spectrum Show, don’t want to reveal the actor yet but it was a riot.

BC: He just told me actually. Honestly like 45 seconds ago I didn’t know until he just told me!

HA: It’s a conspiratorial Spectrum Show about like conspiracy mountain. The guy was playing it, awesome just awesome.

BC: That;s cool

HA: I think we shot like three segments with him. This is basically content that the player will be able to see in the hub ship when he is like watching or switching tv channels.

BC: Oh that’s awesome. Good any other, so when you guys went there though obviously all of its planned out ahead of time and it’s kind of a well oiled machine, what actors are coming in at what times and so on. But you guys got through everything you intended, you wanted to do?

HA: Sometimes I think you need to go longer on certain days if you haven’t planned it our right, but this time I think one time we did an hour longer than planned but it was all fine

BC: So you have one more shoot then for Squadron 42?

HA: Basically there’s one more shoot I don’t want to say which actor it’s going to be but basically we need to schedule some shoots around certain actors beards and when they can grow and when they can’t grow and stuff like this. We have one more coming up in July which I think is two weeks and that’s it. Then we wrap basically 100% complete for story content

BC: Cool. I need to shut up or everyone’s going to make fun of me for going too long but thanks for coming in Hannes. I literally just grabbed and ran with me. Thanks again for guys for all the support see you next week.

Back to Studio

BL: Thank you to all of our studios for the fantastic work you do. Thanks for getting in your monthly reports in time too

SG: Now over to Jared who sat down with our new Character Art Director Josh Herman

DL: Good. So, Character Art Director, you’ve just come on board. Why don’t you give us a quick run down, what is a Character Art Director do?

JH: Sure, so, basically I’m overseeing the global teams both in the UK and in LA, where our character teams are based and I’m going to be going to be covering all the PU stuff, all the SQ42 stuff, Cinematics and Marketing, so anything that’s going to be character related whether it’s content or character art is going through me.

DL: Now this is a new position here at Cloud Imperium Games, previously- we’ve had Art Directors before but characters fell under the purview of other Art Directors.

JH: Yeah, exactly.

DL: What makes now the time, and you might not be able to answer this because you’re brand new, but what makes this time to say “we need a dedicated Character Art Director”?

JH: I think when you have two games that are running at the same speed where you’re trying to get them both out at the same, they’re both going to have their own priorities so if you have an Art Director on Squadron and you have an Art Director on the Persistent Universe those things don’t always align and so it’s easier to have one voice that’s going to be able to control them both rather than having two separate Art Directors if they need to communicate all the time – this one just cuts it down so there is just one. Just one voice makes it a little easier.

DL: Gotcha, and so you’ve seen all the work- we did the mocap with Mark Hamill

DL: We’ve added a couple people recently that we’re not ready to talk about yet. So, you’ve just joined the team, where did you come from? Where did you come from, to us? From, from-to us? Where did you come from to us? Where did you come from-

Thomas Hennessy (TH): Come to us from..

JH: I came to you from-

DL: Where did you come to us from?

JH: I came from Marvel Studios, so basically some people get confused when I say Marvel Studios, they think sometimes that’s the game division. Does that mean I worked on the Fox X-Men movies? No. Basically what it means is I worked on all the “Avengers” movies.

So anything that includes Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Guardians of the Galaxy, any of those movies and I worked in the Visual Development group. What that means is we’re the Art department that oversees all the movies, so Iron Man’s costume has been designed by pretty much the same couple guys, Captain America’s costume has been done by the same guys throughout all the movies that he’s been in and that keeps it so that as the Universe, it’s persistent, right?

So that there is a good look… the guys who are designing Guardians of the Galaxy are the same guys that are designing Avengers characters so that when that eventual crossover happens – which you all know is planned to happen – it all fits.

DL: Were you there when they pitched Iron Man 3 and they said there was going to be 30 Iron Man costumes.

JH: Yes, actually. I used to… before I worked at Marvel, I actually worked at Naughty Dog and my contract was ending and so I was in discussions with Marvel and they were saying “we want you to come on for Iron Man 3, this’ll be the first movie you’ll do in-house.” and I had done the Iron Man suit at the end of Avengers – the one that flies down when he jumps out the building. I did that one – and they really liked working with me so they basically said “we want you to do the Mk42 – which is the gold suit – we want you to do the Iron Patriot suit and then at the end of this movie we have a scene where there is 40 suits that come out – and we want you to do as many as you can.”.

So during my four and a half years there I modelled about thirteen different versions of Iron Man.

DL: And which version was your favourite and why was it heartbreaker?

JH: [laughs] I think my favourite version, I’m torn between the Mk7 because that was the first one that I did, and it’s still one of my favourites, and then I really actually like the, I think it’s the 45, which is the one he wore in Age of Ultron- the end of Age of Ultron, I liked that, because it kept like a sleeker style that I like those two and then a big fan of War Machine – so any of the War Machines that I worked on were super cool too.

DL: Yeah, none of that garbage triangle-

JH: [laughs] I didn’t, I was the last type-

DL: Triangle Arc Reactor.

JH: When I started on the 7 they went back to the circle, so I was pretty excited about that.

DL: I don’t know why they did that.

JH: Not a fan of the triangle.

DL: Alright, so you mentioned you worked at Naughty Dog before that? Uncharted series?

JH: Uncharted 3, yeah.

DL: Uncharted 3.

JH: I worked on a lot of the multiplayer stuff – the background, creating a custom character creator system there – so that if you created your custom hero you could swap out pants and gloves and hats and do all that kind of stuff. And then I also did a few story characters – so the main one I did was Salim, so he’s the Bedouin leader at the end of the game who comes in and saves Drake and shows him the way.

DL: Spoiler alert.

JH: Sorry.

DL: Old game – I’ve never played an Uncharted.

JH: Spoiler alert – he gets saved by a Bedouin leader.

TH: [inaudible]… right now.

JH: Sorry.

TH: It’s alright, I’m-

DL: Now why did you leave Marvel studios to come here?

JH: It’s just- I wanted a little bit of a change of pace and once you model so many Iron Man suits and you’ve done the- you kind of get into a routine, you’re looking for something more exciting and something different – something that is a challenge and so Star Citizen is obviously an incredibly ambitious game and there’s lots of different- and then add on to that Squadron 42 and all the stuff that we want to do and that we’re doing and we wanna just- it’s- you can’t really ask for a more- more of a challenge than that.

DL: Yeah, ambitious is a good word.

JH: Yeah, ambitious, right.

DL: Yeah, we hear that word a lot in press. Yeah, we know how ambitious it is,

JH: We understand, yeah.

DL: There’s a reason, you know. We all came on to this because we wanted to work on the most ambitious thing in the world.

JH: Yeah.

DL: So, some questions that I know the community are gonna want me to ask. So, since you’re brand new… Well you’ve been here for what? 2 or 3 weeks now? 4 weeks?

JH: I think this is like day 12.

DL: Okay, so you’re brand new. So we can hit you with the hard ones.

JH: That’s good.

DL: Where’s my hair? When do our characters get hair?

JH: We’re working on it. I can tell you right now we’re working on it. We’re working on some of the Squadron 42 hero characters’ hair first. We do have a pipeline that we’ve just set in place for character hair and stuff for customization and stuff. So, it’s coming. It’s on the way.

DL: Second hard question: Female avatars.

JH: Also in progress. We’ve put some revisions in it and I don’t really have a timeline but I can tell you it’s coming.

DL: We’ve just made some recent revisions. I saw them on Shotgun recently. So, that’s coming along pretty good-

JH: Yeah, I’m excited.

DL: Or pretty well. I no english too good as evidenced by this interview already. So, hair is in progress. Female avatars are in progress.

JH: Yup.

DL: With 2.4 we have the first rollout of shopping and being able to customize your clothes and stuff like that and that is only the first-

JH: Oh yeah absolutely.

DL: 2.4 isn’t the end-

JH: No, not even close.

DL: People are gonna be like, “Oh, there’s 6 shirts and 4 pants…” I’m just pulling numbers out of my butt guys. However many shirts and however many pants there are. But that’s not it, that’s not the end.

JH: No.

DL: This will be something we continuously-

JH: Yeah, this is like the sampling. We want to make sure that some of the systems work and you know, when you go to a parts system with characters where you have shirts and pants and… everything kinda needs to work together. Every possible option needs to be able to work with every possible option.

DL: Yeah.

JH: So, this is the kinda test run for that and then for each release we want to try to have a little bit more content and a little bit more content so that, you know, every time you get in there in a new release you’re gonna have a lot more stuff to play with.

DL: Gotcha. This first rollout is more about the tech – the new item port system and stuff like that – than it is the content.

JH: Exactly.

DL: Once the tech and systems are in place then we can start exploiting it. And we’re hiring new artists in every studio. We just hired a new technical artist here. I can’t remember his name right now. They brought him by my desk yesterday and introduced him to me and I don’t remember remember his name, sorry whoever you are…

DL: I’m not good with names. So, were you a fan of the project before?

JH: Mhmm.

DL: When did you first find out about Star Citizen?

JH: A couple years ago – I’m friends with Gurmukh, the concept artist.

DL: I’m sorry.

JH: I’m friends with him – I had known about it before and then he started – we actually started teaching at the same place and that’s actually how we started talking about it and I got more into it – bought a starter pack, flew around and figuring out what the game was. And then just I got more interested in it as I followed it a lot more, watching all the shows you guys do – which I’m now on, which is weird-

DL: [laughs]

JH: But it’s slowly getting my interest piqued in it – like, “oh this is, oh” because the thing that was really interesting to me was the Star Citizen – the big open thing – but then also understanding how much of a full game and the cast that 42 is too.

DL: Yeah.

JH: Yeah, so..

DL: It’s definitely two triple A-titles we’re doing at the same time.

JH: Absolutely, yeah.

DL: Alright, well, that’s about all, we need to you adjust first, get your feet wet and whatnot. I know you’re heading off to the UK in a couple weeks to help build our processes there and whatnot. So that’s for stopping by, that’s Josh Herman, our new Character Art Director for Squadron 42 and Star Citizen. Back to you guys.

Now tell me everything you know about Phase 4.

ATV Rewind: BugSmashers Launches

Alpha 2.4: The QA Experience

Justin Binford (JB): Hi I Justin Binford. I’m the QA Director, I manage the QA department in our four main studios around the world.

So in QA we have teams in each studio and we do a “follow the sun” development approach. And it facilitates a more seamless approach to QA development coverage and almost have a 24 hour coverage which is super helpful for development.

2.4 was … is definitely exciting for the new mechanic Persistence. Everybody’s looking forward to how Persistence will change the game: so what you do in the world will be saved. Persistence is … has so many moving parts, so it’s definitely been the most challenging aspects of testing this new build because Persistence will touch every other feature.

Don Allen (DA): We couldn’t just respawn and have everything reset now. Our damage states and the ship states and everything were staying the same so we had to work around that quite a bit.

Bryce Benton (BB): We’ve also been dealing with … learning the new control schemes that are being … currently being implemented.

Jesse Mark (JM): It’s a large amount of content. We have shopping, we have new Port Modification for the hangars and the ships. So it’s just a lot of content to test and get ready.

JB: So the other features we have are the shopping, the Port Modification, and the ship repair and refuel which all ties into Persistence. And so that can complicate testing where we would have multiple items, items disappearing, and it also introduced some stability issues where players would get kicked out of the game. And so there’s a lot of issues related to Persistence that we had to fix before we opened up 2.4 to a wider audience and eventually to the Live environment.

Scott McCrea (SM): PTU Testers are are essential to going from PTU to the Live. The QA … the QA people can only find so much: there’s only so much we can do.

Robert Gaither(RG): Well I think the benefit of PTU in general, especially the big PTU with everybody in there, is that we need people to stress test everything and give Ahmed a chance to get the servers running in shape. So we need lots of people in there just doing everything at once: just … just maxing out the servers. We have all the bugs that QA didn’t have time to write up or capture or get to that area and when we send that to the huge group of people then we have all these people reporting the same stuff and most of them are upset by it and don’t want to keep playing because of these bugs keep getting in their way. And so I think it’s really beneficial to have a middle ground where we have like here people specifically looking for specific bugs and getting them in in a very orderly way. And then after that we can open the floodgates to everybody else and they can have more fun writing less bugs and also just giving us the server stress that we need.

BB: I have so many things to thank the PTU Testers for. They’ve been so great. They all collaborate together in Discord. They’ve been getting in group and testing everything out. They’ve been helping us by making sure that there’s not duplicate Issue Councils, they’ve been going and verifying each other’s Issue Councils and actually searching that they’re there. They’ve actually been so great in Discord, like when we ask them to do anything they stop everything they are doing and just go.

DA: The biggest thing that excites me about 2.4 is the addition of the money system now and buying things. It’s obviously in a very early state but that’s obviously a huge leap and a huge next step for the game.

BB: I think the most exciting part is earning the money, having your hostility system. That’s actually starting to really feel like the game we’ve all be waiting for.

JB: Thank you so much with all the testing that you’ve been helping us with. As you know our QA department is relatively small so we definitely leverage as much as we can the community when it comes to testing. And the Evocati group has been incredibly valuable in testing 2.4 and the new features going in.

MVP w/Tyler Witkin

Tyler Witkin (TW): Hey there, Tyler Witkin, Community Manager in the Austin, Texas studio here to bring you this week’s MVP. A huge congratulations to Bad News Baron for organising an 5 v 5 FPS battle onboard a Starfarer which you saw a sample of in the beginning of this episode.

We love seeing this level of emergent gameplay arise during Star Citizen’s development and one of the reasons that this video is so exciting to watch is because it gives you a glimpse into intense gameplay and exciting boarding action that Star citizen will have in the future.

So congrats again to you sir, you’re this week’s MVP, back to you guys.

ATV Fast Forward

SG: Bad News Baron,yay he’s one of our favourites.

BL: Yes I see him streaming all the time. One of our early backers, there’s lots of fantastic streamers, but he’s certainly up there.

SG: I love it, BNB, talk about BNB being a cool dude.

BL: I wrote that, I think he’s a cool dude and he organised that video which is.

Outro

BL: Be sure to tune to Reverse the Verse tomorrow at 11am Pacific on Twitch. We’ll be talking about that Fast Forward, the status of 2.4, and everything else good.

SG: With that a thank you as always to all of our Subscribers for making this show possible. We will see you next week on Around The Verse.

BL: Around The Verse.

[Credits]

BL: We have some sad news also we’d like to talk about. Just before we started shooting this morning we got word that one of our backers, a Mr Erik Auberg, very sadly passed away. He was just a really good guy. I interacted with him on Twitter a bunch. He was out there with the community. We wanted to dedicate this episode to him at least. We’ve passed his name and some information about ships he loved to the writers, Dave Haddock and everybody. They’re going to incorporate him in the lore. It’s always really hard to get news like this. Our backers are here living this dream with us, they are all going the same place we are and it is really sad to lose one along the way. But we are going to do the best job we can to make the game you’re waiting for sir. And if we get more information about how you can leave condolences and so on we’ll share it on RTV on Friday. But sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

A polite Canadian who takes pride in making other peoples day brighter. He enjoys waffles with Maplesyrup, making delicious puns and striving for perfection in screaming at the T.V. during hockey games.